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Posts Tagged ‘received’

How Can You Tell if an Email Was Transmitted Using TLS Encryption?

Tuesday, October 29th, 2019

Frequently, we are asked to verify if a sent or received email was encrypted using SMTP TLS during transmission. For example, banks, healthcare organizations under HIPAA, and other security-aware institutions require that emails be secured by TLS encryption.

Email should always be transmitted with this basic level of email encryption to ensure that the email message content cannot be eavesdropped upon. To see if a message was sent securely, looking at the raw headers of the email message in question is easy. However, it requires some knowledge and experience to understand the text. It is actually easier to tell if a recipient’s server supports TLS than to tell if a particular message was securely transmitted.

To analyze a message for transmission security, we will look at an example email message sent from Hotmail to LuxSci. We will see that Hotmail did not use TLS when sending this message. Hotmail is not a good provider to use when security or privacy are required.

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Tracing the Origin of an Email Message — and Hiding it

Tuesday, March 17th, 2015

We are often asked by our users to help them determine from where an email message has originated. “Where did this spam come from?”

In general, it is fairly easy to do this if you have access to the “headers” of the message.  In this post, we will show you how to determine a message’s original location yourself and also how you can protect yourself from others determining your location when you send email messages to them.

Why would you need to protect yourself — If you are traveling and do not want people to know where you are; if your messages are not going through because your ISP is blacklisted or has a poor reputation.

 

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Why Email is Not Instantaneous — and Not Supposed to Be

Tuesday, October 15th, 2013

The common perception is that email messages seem to arrive almost as soon as they are sent. Messages often appear to be delivered “instantaneously.” So, when an email delay occurs, it seems like something must be wrong. Sometimes there is a problem. Sometimes the delay is the result of normal email flow.

If the messages never show up at all, that is a different situation altogether. See “Where’s the Email? The Case of the Missing or Disappearing Email” for diagnosing those issues.

The multi-server delivery path

When an email message is sent, it is given to an email server for processing and delivery. That email server may forward it on to another email server, and so on, until it ultimately arrives in the recipient’s mail box.

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Having Problems Sending Email Because Your ISP is Blacklisted?

Wednesday, October 9th, 2013

It happens over and over — users trying to send legitimate email messages are blocked from sending because the IP address that they are getting from their Internet Service Provider (ISP) for their personal computer (or small office) is on some major blacklist, like SpamHaus.  Comcast, for example, has been the focus of many of these issues. This message blocking often happens even if a user is sending outbound email through a legitimate email provider like LuxSci.

Users invariably ask:

  • Why is the mail blocked even though I am sending through LuxSci or some other email provider and not directly from my ISP?
  • What can I do about it?

Fortunately, there is a good reason why the blocks occur and an easy solution to them … anonymous SMTP service to hide your IP address.

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